Nice K-Date photos...

[MarkC]

Leon DeSpain and the other member of the forum....

My only question is to why the Germans ended at 10000? We all know the Germans are efficeint, why would they have a stamping machine with more than 4 digits and not use the extra room for a series of guns to follow the extra sequence, 10001, 10002, etc. Also, some of the guns mentioned in this thread have a letter suffix.

Example, if the 10000e or f guns are correct there should be a number of guns (thousands) with the 1xxxx numbers followed by a letter. Granted the 1 numbered guns are rare because they are the begining of a seperate date/series designation of guns... but why would they end at 10000? Seems a waste of serial numbers and tooling to me. I have no proof... so should I not even mention this logic?

If the theory of 5 digit guns were correct, shouldn't we see more 5 digit serial numbers with a letter suffix? How many Lugers do you guys own in the a-z blocks.....??? (Only 4 digit numbers of course) Based on what I know about German quality control, they would not waste an extra serial number block just to have guns that had serial numbers of 10000.

War time control was even more important than commercial serial numbers. It is my understanding that the 4 digit serial numbers with a letter were produced to prevent the allies from knowing exactly how many guns they were making, a four digit serial is much harder to figure out than a five, it was a code of sorts, unlike 1911A1's which just ran through their series of numbers into the millions.....

MarkC